We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Hope Fear Debt Paranoia

Hope, fear, debt and
paranoia have been recurrent themes running through our past month as
we traversed the northwest corner of the
European continent through Iceland, Britain and Denmark.

Iceland is the
country that told the world its bankers are not too big to jail and it
will not be blackmailed by London, Bonn, or the European central
banks. It is still taken to the woodshed regularly and reminded who
is in charge. Icelanders are not free to leave their country or to take money with them if they are allowed to go.

Britain is Europe's
bad boy, master of every latest Ponzi scheme and constantly one step
ahead of collapse, eking astonishing profits as all about her topple and fall. Denmark
is a dreamweaver, whose sheer powers of imagineering seem to emanate
an aura that can warp reality. With nothing but fairy dust to back
its notes and debts, it is poised to
test the durability of its famed social capital when placed in the vice grip of
open imigration. Like many former bastions of European liberalism, it has taken a hard swing to the right and is getting set for the clown show that follows.The United States is far along down the circus trail, having starved its science, educational and social programs for decades while feeding its population a steady diet of numbing pharmaceuticals, mind-rotting television, high fructose corn syrup and GMOs, until they can be readily induced in their coma to vote against their own interests, over and over, producing a government of popular lunacy — clownocracy — a Mad Hatter's Tea Party overseen by Donald Trump, as Queen of Hearts; "a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion - a blind and aimless Fury" (description by Lewis Carroll).

Debt is a theft of the options of future generations. To escape debt and claw their way back from penury people will rape, plunder and pillage every last sacred resource, leaving not an inheritance but a ruin. Cascading debt may sweep much of civilization away, perhaps in Jubilee, but the damage will have been done to foundations — and be visited as ecosystem death. Every dollar that cannot possibly be repaid in sweat and hours becomes a drain on Earth's operating system. We grew giddy wealthy on our energy slaves. Don't look now, but they just left and winter is coming.

Obstruction is an
occupational hazard we accept because we are in the business of
bringing hope, otherwise labeled permaculture, or ecovillage, but we
are frequently obstructed and overpowered by those other three
elements — fear, debt and paranoia. From time to time we break
through enough to peer over the horizon and see what might yet be.

Fear and paranoia
are what drive the security state apparatus we encounter most closely
and personally when we stand in long lines at airports and then let
some gentleman we have only just met fondle our genitals. Of course,
we could avoid having our genitals fondled if we would agree to
placing ourselves in front of his death ray for a few milliseconds.
We know that a few milliseconds won't kill us on the spot but its
like buying a ticket in the cancer lottery, and we go through
airports often so if we didn't do this fondling ritual we might soon
have a shoebox full of such raffle tickets, and who knows? We might
win.

Research suggests
that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year may
be getting cancer from the machines.
Still, any time you opt out, some brainwashed TSA officer will try to
persuade you that scanners are “safe,” or equal to “less than
three minutes of air travel,” glossing over the fact that even the
lowest doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at
the body by the scanners and qualitatively not much different in
the non-ionizing radiation of millimeter wave devices —
will increase your lifetime risk of cancer and inherited damage to
your offspring, increasing your and their susceptibility to hundreds
of genetically related diseases and disabilities.

It is refreshing to
go through airports in Europe and not have to go through these
machines because they are banned in Europe and would have been banned
in the United States had the scientific or medical community made the
call. As it was, the call was made by apparatchiks who skipped the
legally required public comment period before deploying the scanners,
and bypassed the Food and Drug Administration by waving their Patriot Act,
and then, in defending these cruel devices, relied on a small body
of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, ignoring
contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended
precautions, especially for pregnant women. Rapiscan employed
Chertoff Group, founded by Homeland Security Nomenklatura Michael Chertoff, to make sure the government worked for them.

In 2013, under
threat of a court order, TSA removed the ProVision, made by defense
contractor L-3 Communications, from the most busy US airports but
re-installed them in smaller airports, such as ours at Nashville.
With the L-3, a passenger enters a chamber that looks like a round
phone booth and is scanned with a form of low-energy radio waves
which have not yet been shown cause cancer, but only because that
kind of epidemiological research can take up to half a century.
Nonetheless, the mechanism for DNA disruption is established by
research into powerlines and other sources of electromagnetic
radiation. Millimeter wave devices like the L-3 re-sequence DNA in
dividing cells. Does that sound safe?

A review by the
National Academy of Sciences found “no compelling evidence” that
there is any level of radiation at which the risk of cancer is zero.
Rapiscan and the Chertoff group rake in half-a-billion tax dollars
per year because safety advocates, medical community and the FDA
cannot get traction against paranoia.

We don't place the
rational avoidance of premature death and disability in the category
of either fear or paranoia. It is merely good sense. We also know
that if even ten percent of people were aware of the risk and acted
rationally with regard to those airport scanners and opted for the
pat-down as we do, then the whole fake façade of security would come
to a grinding halt. TSA might actually re-examine their machine's
efficacy and decide to do as they do in Europe: junk them.

Which brings us to
the Pope and the U.S. Budget.

John Boehner looking like the cat that swallowed the canary

Watching the Pope
speak to Congress from the C-Realm watchtower in Brooklyn we were
struck by how uncomfortable the Speaker of the House, Hon. John
Boehner, a devout Catholic, seemed during that part of the speech, so
passionately phrased and delivered, about not falling into a
polarized view of the world. The whole Republican plan for world
domination is based on repeating the mantra, “Be Afraid, Be Very
Afraid.” This is how they can get away with not releasing the
Senate Committee Report on torture, fight trillion-dollar wars against
countries that have not threatened them, dig deeper data mines for blanket surveillance, and why you have to take off
your shoes at US airports but not abroad.

In 2001 “Shoebomber”
Richard Reid attempted to
detonate explosives packed into his shoes while on an American
Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. He just gave himself a
hotfoot, no worse, but he is now serving 3 consecutive life terms without
parole, plus 110 years, in maximum security prison. There was also an
underwear bomber on Christmas Day, 2009, using about the same size device, made of identical plastic explosive, but for some unexplained
reason no one asks us to take off our underwear.

There is also no
reason to imagine that the plastic explosive used by both the
Shoebomber and the Underwearbomber would be detected today any better
than it was in 2001 and 2009. It would pass right through x-rays and
scanners without looking any different than any other shoes,
underwear, belt buckle, book or briefcase. The scanners are useless as
detection devices, but useful to keep an entire population
frightened, and that is the idea. It is about polarization. Us and the Muslims, the rich and the rabble, survivors and zombies.

The Speaker, seated
a few feet behind the Holy Father, was fidgeting and then wiping
tears. Right afterwards Republicans voted to drop their usual budget
blackmail and avert yet another government shutdown, saving billions
in tax waste and fraud, and the next morning after attending mass as
he does daily, Boehner, the highest ranking member and third in line
to the Presidency, announced he was retiring from politics at the end
of October, giving only one month's notice. He said he came to the
conclusion after morning prayers that “today's the day I'm going to
do this. Simple as that.”

Michael Moore called
this the Pope's first miracle. "God knows what’s next over
there,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi told her staff
members. “Coming from earthquake country, this is a big one.”
Boehner "blamed the House’s hard-right members, who he said
were unwilling to govern," which was, of course, the Pope's
point.

A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the
name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also
safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual
freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially
guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or
evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary
world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and
sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which
would divide it into these two camps. We know that in the attempt to
be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy
within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers
is the best way to take their place. That is something which you, as
a people, reject.

Perhaps the Pope
gives USAnians too much credit. Still, the line about “to imitate
the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to
take their place” has real substance in the context of the
Bush/Cheney legacy. Paranoia is in the driver's seat in Washington.
It is not a rational fear, based on real enemies. It is an irrational
fear based on a perverted sense of entitlement and the perceived but incorrect need to
protect your superabundant ill-gotten gains from forceful repossession by their
rightful owners.

Ironically, this has
been the racket of the Holy See for a couple millennia. What's more
to be feared than burning in Hell for all eternity? Is that what John
Boehner thought about in his morning prayers?

If he is changing
his life now and wants some real hope, we will be offering more
permaculture design courses next Spring.

Friends

Dis-complainer

The Great Change is published whenever the spirit moves me. Writings on this site are purely the opinion of Albert Bates and are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 "unported" copyright. People are free to share (i.e, to copy, distribute and transmit this work) and to build upon and adapt this work – under the following conditions of attribution, n on-commercial use, and share alike: Attribution (BY): You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non-Commercial (NC): You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike (SA): If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws. Therefore, the content ofthis publication may be quoted or cited as per fair use rights. Any of the conditions of this license can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder (i.e., the Author). Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license. For the complete Creative Commons legal code affecting this publication, see here. Writings on this site do not constitute legal or financial advice, and do not reflect the views of any other firm, employer, or organization. Information on this site is not classified and is not otherwise subject to confidentiality or non-disclosure.

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